Letters to the Editors

Investors want to see a crackdown on wrongdoing

Re: Business as usual.

Your editorial of July 10 regarding Wall Street's (the investing public's) negative reaction to President Bush's Tuesday speech was was right on target.

What the president doesn't seem to understand is that rhetoric about taking steps to prevent a repeat of what has happened isn't what we want to hear. It is an absolute certainty that "caveat emptor" will for most of us be the guiding principle from this day forward.

What we really want is to see the Armani-clad CEOs who arrogantly and shamelessly invoke their Fifth Amendment rights wearing orange jumpsuits with wrist jewelry courtesy of the U.S. government.

We want someone of the caliber of Rudolph Giuliani, or Giuliani himself, heading the newly created Justice Department SWAT team investigating financial crimes. He knows his way around Wall Street having worked that beat before. Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken are testimony to that fact.

We want the elimination from the auditing lexicon terms such as "gray area" and "extremely complicated transaction." We now know the terms for what they really are: code words for "we did something wrong and we are trying to hide it."

Finally, I never thought I would agree with anything Nikita Khrushchev said, but he certainly was correct when he opined that "Wall Street is where the sharks devour the sardines."
-- Francis A. Cerio, Palm Harbor

End the bickering

This market is not going to turn around until the people in Washington stop bickering with each other about which party is to blame for this fiasco. Everyone knows that this was caused by the greed of a few CEOs and board members in a few different companies. And until the government seizes their bank accounts and sends someone to jail for inflicting this fraud on the public nothing will change.

The members of al-Qaida must be laughing at us, for they couldn't have done a better job on our stock market if they tried.
-- Robert J. Vaughan, Holiday

Investors share the blame

Why is everyone blaming company CEOs and other officers for the fraud and stock woes? The investors are also a large part of the problem. The public expects almost immediate gains and is spooked if a company earns less than expected (even if it made a profit). And worse, investors made it clear to the corporations they won't hold stock long-term (five years plus). Mutual funds are led by investors with sometimes more than 100 percent turnover rates. If investors pushed a buy-and-hold long-term strategy such as was used successfully, corporate America would not have to be so pressured to perform or perish.
-- Thomas Kolter, Clearwater

Bush dealings bear a closer look

It's about time we took a look Bush's business dealings in the days before he became governor of Texas. After all, in the Whitewater deal, Bill Clinton lost money, and the taxpayers had to pick up the tab on the eight year, $70-million investigation. In the Harken Energy deal, George Bush made a cool $850,000. That's okay. It's still legal to make money, but some ways are more legal than others.

According to Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose in their book Shrub: ". . . the Harken Board appointed Bush and another company director, E. Stuart Watson, to a 'fairness committee,' to determine how restructuring would affect ordinary shareholders. . . . Smith Barney, Harris Upham & Co., the financial consultants Harken hired, warned Bush and Watson that only drastic action could save the company. Bush took drastic action. He unloaded his Harken stock before news of the company's precarious health was made public, at a time, U.S. News & World Report wrote, when there was 'substantial evidence to suggest that Bush knew Harken was in dire straights.' . . . Bush reported the sale eight months after the federal deadline . . . The Wall Street Journal ran a small item about Bush's late filing and said that while the SEC files civil suits against flagrant violators of insider-reporting rules, first-time violators usually get only a warning."

The SEC did say, however, that their lack of action did not constitute an exoneration of wrong doing.

Harken Energy also had ties to the BCCI scandal and Middle Eastern oil, which is another matter. Besides, George's father was president of the United States at the time.

There are other business deals that, on the surface, also look a little shady. Maybe everything was perfectly legal, but as Republicans were fond of saying while investigating Bill Clinton: character counts.

It's time to put the boot on the other foot and see how it fits.
-- David Lawrence, Tampa

Democrats are spreading fear

Our stock markets are in turmoil, not because big business is in trouble, but because these naysayer, doom and gloom, fear-mongering Democrats and their sycophants in the press have uninformed Americans mistakenly believing that every CEO is corrupt and is intent on stealing money from pensioners and stockholders.

These issueless Democrats don't have a single positive item in their agenda for the fall elections, so they're busily scaring seniors and small investors with dishonest tales of widespread corruption, deceit and fraud in all American companies.

President Bush is doing what he can to reassure investors and pensioners that our stock markets continue to be America's economic backbone and that the corruption is only within the half dozen companies, out of tens of thousands listed in our stock markets, that have a very few dishonest, corrupt and deceitful people at their helms.

Bush's recommendations for strengthening SEC rules and better punishing the very few corporate chief executives who stray from the course of honesty and full disclosure should be more than enough to reassure investors. What we need is less politically charged rhetoric from issue-less Democrats fanning the flames seeking only some re-election edge.
-- Robert C. Gotshall Jr., Palm Bay

Raising more questions

President Bush's responses to questions about his insider selling of Harken Energy stock shortly before the company announced a huge loss, at Monday's press conference, raise more questions than he evaded. Pretty breathtaking since, at the time of the sale, he was a member of both the Harken board of directors and its audit committee. To paraphrase Howard Baker: "What didn't he know, and when did he not know it?"
-- Dave Anderson, Westchase

Drug testing makes students choose

Re: An Erosion of Rights, July 1.

The recent Supreme Court decision allowing random drug testing of school students who participate in extracurricular school activities is seen by some as eroding further our constitutional rights. Nevertheless, the decision comes at a time when we must balance those rights against the important interests of ensuring that students in public schools receive their education free of the influence of illegal drugs. Education is not a fundamental right, and as long as the government is paying the bill for public schools, the government has the right to set the rules. After all, students are free to attend private schools if they wish.

Many employees now are subject to random drug tests, even where their job is not of a critical nature. These employees have the choice to work or use illicit drugs. Given the importance of providing for food and shelter, it's not hard to make that choice rationally. Similarly, while playing chess or singing in the school choir are not activities where one will generally suffer from being under the influence, except possibly to corner your king or sing out of tune, the new policy will force school kids to make a choice -- drugs or drama class. After all, these kids will soon face the prospect of making that same choice after they finish school -- the choice of drugs or a job. What can be wrong with teaching that important lesson earlier rather than later?

Drug use among high school students has increased dramatically in the past few years. There is no more important goal than to decrease this trend. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg's concern that the policy will prevent students from otherwise participating in the extracurricular activities completely misses the point. Students will prevent themselves from doing so by using drugs. Quite simply, it's their choice.
-- Robert Patton Jr., M.D. J.D., Clearwater

Drug testing isn't the answer

Re: Support for drug testing of students.

The letter writers who support drug testing in schools do so with empty arguments. To justify such support by stating the obvious -- no one wants adolescents using drugs -- is an emotional twist to the logic that the ends justifies the means.

To assume that random drug sampling will prevent an individual from using drugs is just plain inaccurate. Ask any probation officer whose client routinely fails these screens despite the threat of imprisonment. Ask any nurse who delivers baby after baby to drug positive mothers who know they will be tested at that child's birth.

Stating that children don't have rights is the most ludicrous of all. If that's the case, let's disband Family Continuity and Child Protective Services immediately and allow child abuse to go on. After all, what right does a child have to protection?

Finally, the most annoying and dangerous argument of all: Parents would want to know if their children are using drugs. Really? I have some good advice for the parents -- drug test them yourself. Start being parents and stop expecting schools, social service agencies and other outside entities to do your job. Services are available to accomplish this, and would protect the rights of students caught up in the "reefer madness" of this century.
-- Eliska Adema, Largo

Asking for more rights violations

Re: Student testing helps parents to fight drugs, letter, July 5.

The letter writer says that by removing the constitutional rights of our children, we are helping parents to deal with their children's drug problems. It was most disturbing to find out that the letter writer, Calvina Fay, happens to be the executive director of Drug Free America Foundation in St. Petersburg.

As far as believing that this blatant violation of privacy would help children save face in front of their peers by using this travesty of justice as an excuse, what about the excuse that "I play sports, and I need to stay in good health?" I guess that's not "cool" enough. I agree with Ms. Fay, when she says that early detection can deter and prevent drug addiction. But perhaps the problem is not in the school's sports programs. Perhaps the problem is in the communication between parents and their children.

Perhaps Ms. Fay should be educating the parents. Be sure to tell them that if they pay attention to and talk with their children, they'll probably become aware of what is going on in their children's lives. You might also look at the drug addiction of the parents. Shall we drug test the parents of the children who play sports in school as well? Maybe we should have CNN do a new vote to see how many parents would agree to that? To take away the student's rights is simply opening a flood gate to future violations of everyone's rights.
-- Brenda Wallis, Dunedin

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